CLASSICAL OPUS no.1

Sergei Prokofiev – “Dance of the Knights (Romeo and Juliet, no.13)”

セルゲイ・プロコフィエフ – 「騎士団のダンス（ロメオ＆ジュリエット、13番）」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 6 minutes

Virulent, ghastly, almost vampiric, this ballet is just like the composer’s disfigured century, whence most of us still hail…  Prokofiev throws a brass-heavy Molotov cocktail that punches, flails and whacks, slaps and birches into ultimate submission.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet_(Prokofiev)

 

A REFLECTION

Hour of Parting, hour of meeting

They know not – nor grief nor rest

Theirs no longing for the future

Theirs no sorrow for the past

By thy day of anguish broken

Think of them and calm thy woe

Be indifferent as they are

To the pangs of earth below

 

Mikhail Lermontov: “Demon”

Published in: on December 30, 2018 at 6:17 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.4

Bela Bartok: “Romanian Folk Dances”

ベラ・バルトーク：「ルーマニアの民俗舞踊」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 8 minutes

Bartok plants arduously corrosive seeds when using exotic time signatures.  He achieves such feats with cliché-free authenticity, neatly condensed into succinct forms.  Rectilinear craftsmanship of gypsy trails oozes from this sunny, carefree medley of cryptic jewels.

This popular set has both a keyboard and an orchestral version (both shown below), but make sure to check the third video by Muzsikas.  The Carpathian dilettante inspiration source hides in plain sight.

 

MUSIC

 

 

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Folk_Dances

 

A REFLECTION

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home:

At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,

Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Then let winged Fancy wander

Through the thought still spread beyond her:

Open wide the mind’s cage-door,

She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

 

John Keats: “Fancy

Published in: on December 27, 2018 at 5:35 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.6

Claude Debussy: “Clair de lune”

クロード・ドビュッシー：「月光」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 6 minutes

A spacious, viscerally delicate, almost effete anthem to unexpected, voiceless tenderness.  Debussy vanquishes the pinnacle of impressionistic sensuality in the most poetic of musical forms.  Two versions are included here.  Seong-Jin Cho’s take on the lunar theme is more immediate in silences that he actively lays down, almost with John Cage-ian dexterity.

 

MUSIC

 

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suite_bergamasque#%22Clair_de_lune%22

 

A REFLECTION

 

Unhappy perhaps the man, but happy the artist torn by desire!

Eager to paint the one that has appeared to me so rarely and that has fled so quickly,

 like a beautiful sad thing left by the traveler carried away into the night.

How long now has he been gone!

 

Charles Baudelaire: “The Desire to Paint”

 

Published in: on December 25, 2018 at 1:59 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.7

Erik Satie: “Gnossienne et Gymnopedies”

エリック・サティ：「グノシエンヌ と ジムノペディ」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 65 minutes

Hypnotic use of unresolved dissonances remains the mark of this ultimate bard of solo keyboard Dadaism.  His wobbly tales of vulnerability are often hailed as psychoactive and having power to mesmerize an attentive listener.  This particular recording starts with three sarabandes, but their presence is not too intrusive.  I recommend the Turkish slant on the theme in the second video, if only for several minutes.

 

MUSIC

 

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnossiennes

 

A REFLECTION

A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.

A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.

 

Arthur Rimbaud: “To a Reason”

Published in: on December 24, 2018 at 3:36 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.11

Carl Orff: “Carmina Burana”

カールオルフ  –  「カーミナ・ブラーナ」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 62 minutes

Whenever staged these days, this hellish, galvanizing riot of athletic singing is re-lived as a jostling cauldron of neo-medievalism.  But it cannot escape the cross-textual appeal it once held for authoritarian-minded listeners.  Escalading the walls of blistering cacophony, this choral mastodon of gargantuan proportions has carried its relevance well beyond the philharmonic.  Völkischer Beobachter, NSDAP’s mouthpiece, tainted the opera’s legacy by praising its “disciplined” approach (more on this controversy in the link below).  But much of its musical bequest remains apolitical.  French ‘zeuhl’ music is often said to be the love child of “Carmina Burana” and John Coltrane’s spiritual period.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana_(Orff)

 

on the pseudo-historical controversy, read here:

 

A REFLECTION

My Soul.  Why should the imagination of a man

Long past his prime remember things that are

Emblematical of love and war?

Think of ancestral night that can,

If but imagination scorn the earth

And intellect its wandering

To this and that and t’other thing,

Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

 

William Butler Yeats: “Dialogue of self and soul”

Published in: on December 20, 2018 at 5:07 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.13

Gustav Holst: “Planets”

グスタフ・ホルスト：「惑星」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 55 minutes

Daring and emphatic in its astral energy, Holst’s series admittedly tends to stalk reliantly on sonorous, resonant marches.  The composer was audibly marooned in the void between the belated naturalism of his teacher Vaughan Williams and more cosmic, unfathomable aspirations.  Sadly, on his moon landing, the late Neil Armstrong listened to Dvorak, not Holst.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets

 

A REFLECTION

How rare the moon, so round and clear!

With cup in hand, I ask of the blue sky,

“I do not know in the celestial sphere

What name this festive night goes by?”

I want to fly home, riding the air,

But fear the ethereal cold up there,

The jade and crystal mansions are so high!

 

Su Shi: “Water Song”

 

Published in: on December 18, 2018 at 7:17 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.16

Erik Satie: “Airs à faire fuire”

エリック・サティー：「逃走する空気」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 4 minutes

Mysteriously ascetic and speculative, this short form is also astonishingly resilient in repeated mood resets.  Less plaintive than Satie’s other compositions, it oscillates along the gravitational structure of louder passages, only to explore the netherland of quieter introspections.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi%C3%A8ces_froides

 

A REFLECTION

And yet whiteness

can be best described by greyness

a bird by a stone

sunflowers

in December

 

Tadeusz Ròzewicz: “A Sketch for a Modern Love Poem”

 

Published in: on December 15, 2018 at 3:58 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.17

Sergei Prokofiev – “Suite from Love for Three Oranges”

セルゲイ・プロコフィエフ – 「三つのオレンジへの恋からのスイート」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 2 minutes

Prokofiev offers here a soaring, freakout cortège of highly animated colossi.  He excels in grotesque, scurrilous treatment of the progression, laden with volatile brass-band style toxicity.  The diatonic genius, who died in Moscow on the same day as Stalin, suffered from the commercial failure of this piece, which was composed while he still lived in the US.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_for_Three_Oranges

 

A REFLECTION

Why am I without joy,

achieving everything,

but grasping

nothing at all?

 

Yevgeni Yevtushenko: “Tomorrow’s Wind”

Published in: on December 14, 2018 at 5:11 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.19

Olivier Messiaen: “Turangalila Symphonie”

オリヴィエ・メシアン：「トゥランガラの交響曲」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 79 minutes

This glorious epitome of asymmetry is intimidating and, at first hearing, rather undecipherable.  And hence, highly rewarding.  The archivist of avian sound departed here to explore revolutionary use of reverb, percussive exoticism and Ondes Martenot.  Some modernism has lost nothing beyond its -ism.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turangal%C3%AEla-Symphonie

 

A REFLECTION

Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood

-submarine formation of transchromatic aeroplanes,

cellular metals numbered in

the flight of images.

 

Tristan Tzara: “Proclamation without Pretension”

Published in: on December 12, 2018 at 5:15 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.25

Claude Debussy: “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”

クロード・ドビュッシー：「動物の午後への前奏曲」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 12 minutes

The poem is instinctively Homeric, spiced with transoceanic unfamiliarity with which we quickly develop sensual intimacy.  The impressionistic savior of tonality infused it with such a wealth of exotic, almost visual harmonies that, once rediscovered, it exerted profound influence on 20th century’s film music.  Here, the Aegean perspectives are deployed by none other than Leonard Bernstein.  Note the suave flute treatment throughout.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A9lude_%C3%A0_l%27apr%C3%A8s-midi_d%27un_faune

 

A REFLECTION

These nymphs I would perpetuate.

So clear

Their light carnation, that it floats in the air

Heavy with tufted slumbers.

Was it a dream I loved?

My doubt, a heap of ancient night, is finishing

In many a subtle branch, which, left the true

Wood itself, proves, alas! that all alone I gave

Myself for triumph the ideal sin of roses.

Stephane Mallarmé: “The Afternoon of a Faun”

Published in: on December 6, 2018 at 4:53 pm  Leave a Comment  
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